Word: grooms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...growing boy he is. A small race mare does well to eat 8 or 9 qt. of oats a day, and 12 qt. are a lot for an above-average male. Secretariat is what track people call a "good doer." He eats 16 qt., and between meals keeps his groom busy replenishing the supply of hay on which he nibbles almost constantly...
After a hard race, many horses hardly eat at all; in trainers' terminology, they back off their feed. After the Derby, Laurin watched the groom prepare Secretariat's usual supper-oats cooked into a mash, plus carrots and some vitamins and minerals, plus some "sweet feed," grains coated with molasses to provide the rough equivalent of a candied breakfast cereal. The mixture filled the better part of a big tub, and Laurin said, "He won't finish that in three days." An hour and a half later the tub was empty...
Horses walk stiff-legged in the cool morning air to the track where they work out, their impassive exercise boys sitting aboard them. At the barns the trainers are supervising the morning's activities; the grooms are cleaning out the stalls or putting the tack on a horse about to go to the track; the hot-walkers are leading the horses that have already been to the track round and round until they have cooled out from their exercise. All with hardly a sound, as if the whole busy scene had been captured in a silent movie. A person...
...same thing just before the Preakness. A TV crew does not faze him. Recently, while a handler was being interviewed, Secretariat calmly began to nibble on the microphone on the off chance that it was edible. Once, while the horse was being led to stable by Groom Ed Sweat, the leather strap broke off in Sweat's hand. A stallion on the loose can be a perilous thing. Were his people scared? "You can say that again," recalls Laurin. But Secretariat merely stopped and waited for Sweat to grab the halter. "He wasn't going anywhere," says...
...Newlyweds Dean Martin, 55, and Catherine Mae Hawn, 25, into a massive ice sculpture of hearts and cherubs. Under 15 hanging cages of cooing white doves, 85 guests enjoyed Dean's favorite beluga caviar ($190 a pound) and Dom Pérignon ($33 a bottle). The bride and groom stayed only an hour, then returned to the site of the wedding: Dean's Bel Air mansion, decorated to resemble a chapel, complete with dark oak pews borrowed from two movie studios...